Coming from the wars of words

It was 1971, at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, late at night during a Tory conference, and Sir (as he then wasn’t) Max Hastings and I were discussing editorship. He was then working for the BBC. Specifically, we were talking about the editorship of the New Statesman. There was discontent there about the tenure of R. H. S. Crossman. It was felt he could not last much longer (he was to depart next year). Max thought Anthony Howard would be an excellent successor, as, indeed, he turned out to be. For himself, he was uninterested in such baubles. ‘What I really like doing,’ he said – I remember his words exactly – ‘is sleeping under an Israeli tank, looking up at the stars.’

This did not seem to me to be the ideal way to spend the night but I refrained from saying so, as it must have been obvious. Max, by contrast, was even then a leading graduate of what I call the Hemingway School of Journalism. Certainly journalism of some kind was in the blood. His father, Macdonald Hastings, was one of those all-purpose writers who prospered modestly in the 1950s and became quite famous, in a small way of business, as an early television reporter. His mother, Anne Scott-James (to whom this book is dedicated), was even more highly regarded in the trade as one of the leading women columnists of the day. She decamped with the recently widowed Osbert Lancaster, leaving Max with his father. His paternal grandfather had been editor of the Bystander.

While Sir Max has never made any attempt to conceal this inky background – on the contrary, he is rightly proud of it -the impression he gives is of a member of the minor gentry, affable but irascible, happier with his dogs and his guns than with politicians and proprietors.